Archive for September, 2009

Thepoint.com’s restrictive character limit didn’t allow me much freedom of expression so I thought I’d take the opportunity to expound here on just what we are up to. The idea here is to create a base of participants who make up the collective body, the total organism as it were, from which useful information will be gleaned for the benefit of all*. Let me explain what I mean.

The wisdom of crowds is a concept that has received quite a bit of publicity lately starting with James Surowiecki’s ground breaking book of the same title that was released in 2004. I am proposing that there exists an opportunity for us as a group to capitalize on this phenomenon for very little personal investment. To do this we will have to, as a whole, go through a series of experiments. Don’t panic for fortunately, the work load of any one “node within the network” will be very small.

The beauty of the proposed process lies in its simplicity. An individual receives the query and reports their earliest, most primal gut feeling answer into a poll. Each participant will be able to see the group consensus form in real time. As we gain steam more sophisticated methods of data gathering and analysis will be developed (though one essential point will be that all results remain unilaterally transparent) and employed but for now this simple poll methodology should suffice to determine whether the hypothesis has any merit.

For each new experiment I will create a separate campaign on The Point. Some will require more participants and some more. The first and current campaign is for FOREX: Phase I. We will need 1500 participants in order to begin. The experiment procedure is very simple. On predetermined dates I will create a thread containing the poll and the question. Each question within the FOREX:Phase I experiment will be the same: Will the EUR/USD currency pair rise by at least 25%, stay within the same range or fall by at least 25% in the next 5 hours? I will then take the consensus answer and open a trade in a demo account with FXCM. The results and the eventual statement will be posted here for everyone to see. This is truly a mutually beneficial relationship. Without each other we have no results and our collective result is immediately available to all.

I am not implying that any given collective consensus should result in a profitable trade. There is no logical reasoning that I could employ to make that case coherently. there is however something that I could say: We can not say that it wont happen. We wont know unless we try. It takes any given individual very little investment in time and effort to participate. Therefor it seems in our best interest to try.

We are here to test two things:

1. Does the collective wisdom choose correctly often enough to generate a profit in the demo account?

2. If not, does the Collective improve it’s results over time?

If the answer to question 1 over time is ‘yes’ then we have discovered an invaluable income stream that is free to all. If the answer to question 1 is ‘no’ but the answer to question 2 is ‘yes’ then we win anyway.

If you haven’t yet joined the campaign and want to you can here**:

One thing to note:

If you are as jazzed up about this please note that we can not begin until we secure the prerequisite 1500 participants. We probably all have at least one like minded friend, who might have one like minded friend, and so on. Twitter is, imo, particularly effective here.

This is the official blog:

And this is the campaign page:

As far as I know I am the first to propose a system such as this, but if I’m wrong please let me know. Collaboration will be an important part of making this system work.

In order to participate in FOREX: Phase I you will need access to a FOREX chart. There are several free web based services but for the sake of consistency I suggest that we all use the same chart service. I recommend MetaTrader. It’s completely free and has been tested for spyware and adware.

I will be giving the exact protocol for participating in FOREX: Phase I in the next post. Let me stress here that you don’t need any knowledge of the FOREX at all. You don’t need any knowledge of speculative investing at all. It is the first impression gleaned form your subconscious that we are interested in collecting. Your ‘gut reaction’, so to speak.